Dharma Reyes-Macaya

The Goldschmidt meeting is the largest international conference focusing on geochemistry. The conference was held at Le Palais des Congrès in Paris this year. More than 4000 scientists from 50 countries attended the conference, presenting about 4200 talks and posters in more than 175 sessions.

I attended the Goldschmidt conference for the first time, and it was my first big conference. I was excited by the amount of topics, plenary lectures and special oral section in my research field: palaeoceanography and paleoclimatogy.

During the first day of the conference, I presented in the early morning the talk “Once Upon a Time, scientific fairy tales Promoting the Discovery, Protection and Use the Ocean” in the session “Outreach – Promoting Geoscience in Schools and the Community”. The motivation to take place in this section was to show the work that our group of science and communication from MARUM called “Oncee upon a time, a scientific farz tale (OUAT)” are doing (see more information inhttps://www.marum.de/en/Discover/Once-upon-a-time.html). Preparing a talk for this type of topic was a nice exercise, nevertheless during the early morning of the first day of the conference, not many people attended the sessions. I received useful suggestions and motivation for continuing with the project.

In the penultimate and last day of the conference, I attended the section “Deoxygenation in the Past, Present and Future Ocean”. Where I had the opportunity to present my PhD project and the first preliminary results about I/Ca as a proxy for oxygenation content reconstruction, entitled “Reconstructing the Variability of the SE Pacific Oxygen Minimum Zone Using Geochemical Proxies in Benthic Foraminifera”. During the meeting, I had the opportunity to talk about the data with my co-supervisor Dr. Babette Hoogakker from the Heriot Watt University (UK). She give me feedbacks about the interpretation of the data and some ideas for the next focus in the production of results during the following two months. I had also the opportunity to meet with PhD students that are studying changes in oxygenation in the north Pacific using redox trace elements and their isotopes after that the section. It was nice to exchange some ideas and strategy for processing our research.

My favourite part of the conference was the special section about the intermediate product of GEOTRACES http://www.geotraces.org/, where I refresh my knowledge about the state of the art about the trace elements and their isotopes in the world ocean. Something very inspiring was to see the motivation and passion of hundreds of scientists for producing this report, and sharing the outcomes. The whole session was amazing.

Besides from the scientific program, during my time in Paris, I had the opportunity to rent a Airbnb with PhD students and postdocs of Organic Geochemistry group of MARUM and discover Paris with them after the conference. As well, I meet with friends that I knew during the Urbino Summer School (2011) and the ECORD Summer School (2013) that we keep the contact.

Overall, the conference was a nice experience and I would like to thank GLO­MAR, OUAT and the AG Hebbeln group for the fi­nan­ci­al sup­port, which made my participation pos­si­ble in the Goldschmidt 2017.